In the modern business environment, employees often use presentation and slide software applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint, Lotus Symphony Presentations or Open Office Presentation, in order to build presentations that are used as a visual support for presenting a subject to an audience. Presentations are composed of slides and each slide has very specific characteristics, in that a slide is a semantic subset of the global message that can be considered as relatively coherent and autonomous and the meaning of a slide is, in most cases, contained in words and the number of words used in a slide is small and limited owing to the visibility constraint.
When such software is used within large organizations, huge numbers of presentations are continuously produced and stored by different individuals in different places. In such organizations it is very difficult for a user to find existing presentations linked to a specific subject and they can only be found if the user knows where they are stored, the meaning of each presentation is included in the name of the presentation, the directory structure and/or some metadata is available and the user has access to the right search tool to crawl through the whole set of presentations. In most cases it is very time consuming or impossible for a user to find a specific slide linked to a subject without actually opening each presentation in turn.
When building a new presentation, a user will often want to reuse slides extracted from other pre-existing presentations and modify them (or not) in order to fit to the proper purpose of the new presentation. In order to find the right raw material, the user is faced with the problems described above and will often spend a lot of time finding presentations that relate to the same subject or to a connected subject and then finding the right slide after having opened the presentation for a new presentation.
Some usable search tools do exist, such as Google Desktop search, which can help a user in relation to a local search but the atomicity will be at the presentation level and not the slide level. Search tools are also provided that are linked to a user's operating system, but there is no solution or tool for a slide level search and for a global search beyond disks identified on the user's local computer. All searches look for a formula that is true across the whole presentation and not only within an individual slide.